


Now you wear your skin like iron

by norgbelulah



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Past Lives, Alternate Universe - Western, Coal Mining, Dreams, Gunplay, M/M, Repressed Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-23
Updated: 2013-01-23
Packaged: 2017-11-26 13:16:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/650896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/norgbelulah/pseuds/norgbelulah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder have known each other all their lives.  It's not until a fateful day working in the mine that they realize they've known each other so much longer.</p>
<p>Long memories, misunderstandings, and a tragic past serve to keep them separated, but always in each other's minds.  Now that Raylan is back in Kentucky, Boyd feels he must act or threaten them both with a miserable and lonely future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Now you wear your skin like iron

**Author's Note:**

> While this fic doesn't really follow the trajectory of the song, I highly suggest listening to "Pancho and Lefty" by Townes Van Zandt before, during, or after you read. The Emmylou Harris or Steve Earle versions are also acceptable.
> 
> Thanks so much to betas and generally wonderful human beings, thornfield_girl, someotherstorm, and scioscribe. I love you all. <3

He shakes off something far too old. He should never have come back here. He should never have let Boyd touch him. That embrace, it was too much, too soon. He feels the old man creeping up on him, more than usual. 

There’s a sadness in Boyd’s eyes that wasn’t there before, regret. Raylan knows it’s not his, not for him, but for the other. He works his jaw and won’t let himself pretend Boyd Crowder regrets anything he’s ever done, especially to Raylan.

He suddenly gets a flash of another wooden room, dark instead of flooded with light from the church windows, bars in the back, dingy cells that he’d get to know soon enough and a man with a smile like Boyd’s sitting with his feet up on the desk. Spurs and all.

There’s no surprise in his eyes now when he says, “Been a long time.” Raylan hears it twice.

“Don’t start this shit with me,” Raylan bites out. 

Boyd always liked the echo so much more than he ever did. It sets Raylan’s teeth on edge. Maybe it does Boyd’s too, but he likes it, he lives for it. Raylan couldn’t do it anymore, not in Harlan, not at nineteen. Raylan is ready to walk out in that very moment so he doesn’t have to again.

Boyd can separate. Raylan just gets lost.

“My apologies, Raylan,” Boyd says, pouring him the ‘shine. 

Raylan takes it and pulls too fast, ready to wash out the taste of the desert from his mouth, to taste home instead, _his_ home. 

Boyd smiles when he coughs. “I’m so happy to see you,” he says and he still looks like the other. He raises his eyebrows because Raylan’s still coughing. “You been gone too long.”

Not nearly, Raylan knows, but he decides not to call Boyd a liar, at least until he starts waxing poetic about mud people with that ink proud on his shoulder. 

There is something dark and tragic in Boyd’s eyes that Raylan’s never seen before when he asks, voice too casual, “Would you shoot me, Raylan?”

Boyd only holds Raylan’s gaze for a moment after he answers, “You make me pull, I’ll put you down.” Something cold, still very old, creeps up his neck as he sees Boyd raise a hand to the back of his head, looking down and away.

When Raylan walks out into the sunshine, he tilts the brim of his hat low, unconsciously, then looks back to see Boyd watching him, leaning casually against the door of his goddamn nazi church. Boyd raises his hand to tip a hat that isn’t there and Raylan feels something stir in his belly, rise up in his chest.

He can’t have it. There is no place for this, never was.

It was always only an echo.

 

Raylan’s always thought of him as an old man. He was young when they were introduced and the places he rode and walked and the people he knew were old too. It was an old time, one you only saw on the tv in black and white reruns.

Arlo slapped him once for boasting _his_ horse was faster than Rowdy Yates’. 

When he cried to his mother and she asked him what he’d meant, he said, “When I was a man, when we was cowboys, my horse was too faster.” Her eyes grew afraid, like he’d never seen them do for Arlo, and she told him never to talk about it again. They were just funny dreams, they’d just go away.

But the old man never did. 

He visited in the night, in his dreams, and in the day too, in the hot sun and the cold nights with the stars. The hills would fall away and he’d be on the prairie, on the way up to Nebraska, and he’d wonder where Johnny got to, taking too long to walk through the herd.

Raylan would blink then, the feeling of the boy’s absence keen enough to cause pain that would bring him back to the now, and he’d shake himself or roll over or take deep breaths until he remembered his own name more than the other’s.

As he grew, and as it became apparent something was strange and scary about the man in his head, Raylan always tried to think of him that way, as an other, as something separate, instead of as himself. 

He was okay at it most of the time, but sometimes he’d forget and say something weird, or keep his hand on his hip like he was thinking of shooting someone. He’d come out of it with his head aching, feeling wrung out, like he’d been underwater for too long, and he’d wonder how he ever thought as a child that this was right, that they were the same. The old man was trying to drown him.

Boyd never felt that. Boyd could separate when he wanted to.

Maybe it was because that old man--who was, at the end, just the same age as Raylan is now-- was always with Raylan, but Boyd didn’t know until so much later. Maybe that’s why to Boyd it wasn’t just an echo, it was a blow to the head, a fist to the chest. 

It was Robert Landry back from the dead, a second time.

 

Boyd’s got his jar of ‘shine in his hand, sitting in a church pew with Raylan’s half-drunk jar next to him. 

He puts the edge of his jar, the almost sharp threads, against his lips and holds it there. Not drinking, just thinking. Remembering. He wants whiskey instead of the clear stuff. He wants that kid in his arms again.

These days, Raylan believes they don’t really want the things they wanted years before, the long years. He thinks they feel the same desires, but that they aren’t truly theirs. Boyd doesn’t care. He wants them anyway, wants him.

He doesn’t know why it took him so long to remember.

He always felt out of his time. He remembers that. “Speaks like the shanty town school teacher,” his daddy said of him at ten or so. He never made great grades, but he was always good at reading, mostly because he felt like he knew all the words already. 

He never went for girls either. Not because he didn’t like them, there were pretty girls everywhere. But because he never felt the need. There was no empty place inside him yearning to be filled, no hunger for lusts he could place a name to. He’d always felt as though he were waiting for something, but what he couldn’t be certain.

He knew Raylan, all his life, but still they worked for days on the line together before it happened. 

That’s the one thing he’ll never understand with any amount of clarity. He saw Raylan’s face, covered in coal dust, whites of his eyes standing out in the dark like they would with the thick layer of ash on their faces under the new moon and the scant light from the stars, so the cowboys wouldn’t see them so easy if they woke while they peeled off a quarter of the herd.

He’d seen Raylan’s face in the mine at least ten times, just that way, and he’d never remembered a damn thing until something happened--he can barely recall what, now. 

They’d gone drinking the night before, for the first time really, and they’d shared a joke at one of the other men’s expense. It’s was something stupid, forgettable, but something happened that day and it reminded Raylan and he’d nudged Boyd, just on the arm, and he’d smiled at him like no one else was there.

Something in Boyd’s stomach dropped like a stone--it does still every time Raylan looks at him--and suddenly he was pulled away.

He was... Johnny, on the prairie, nearer Nebraska than they usually liked to rustle. There was a boy next to him with a blackened face and a crooked smile and they were gonna make some money. 

He loved that boy and, as he looked at him, he knew that boy loved him too.

And then he remembered all at once, the men jumping up from the fire, not asleep, lying in wait, yelling at them and firing off shots, the groaning of the cattle, shaken from their sleep. They tried to run and he slipped away, but that boy tripped and they grabbed him and one cocked a pistol but another yelled, “No, he’s gonna hang in Abilene.”

The boy cried, “Run,” and Johnny was so afraid he listened. He made it to the horses and he dug in his spurs. Later, he tried to go back, but in the short hours he took to circle around, they’d gone.

He remembered this and not much more, but the boy was there too, in his arms and he said, breathless, “R-robert, my God--kid--” 

“Shut up,” he said to him. There was knowledge in his eyes. It was him, it was, but there was anger and fear in his expression.

Robert looked around and Johnny didn’t understand at what, it was just the prairie around them now, tall grass and flat land and the dogies braying in their sleep. 

He thought it must not be the night that they were caught up, or the kid would be gone. He tightened his hand on Robert’s coat. He was warm when the air was cold, when there was no clouds in the sky and it was only the wind and the fire. He’d always been so warm. It must’ve been another night, a good one, because Robert was there and they were all alone for a change and all he wanted to do was hold onto him.

“Pretend like you’re throwing up,” Robert whispered.

“What?”

“Pretend you’re sick. We gotta get out of here, Jo--” 

Robert broke off at the name and Johnny frowned. “Out of where?” They were just out under the stars like always, but the kid spun him around and his back was up against rocks now. Johnny’s eyes widened and he blinked. “Th-the cave?” he asked, but that was so much later and Robert’s face should have been older, weathered. He shouldn’t be clean shaven and his eyes were a different color. Johnny’s head was pounding and--

“No,” Robert growled. “Listen to me, the foreman’s on his way over here, Boyd--”

“Oh, fuck,” he breathed and his legs gave out. There were steady arms around him and he didn’t know whose they were any longer. 

“He’s sick,” someone said. Raylan. It was Raylan’s coveralls he was clinging to, Raylan’s dark, worried, scared-shitless eyes he could barely see, his shaking hands across his back. Raylan Givens who he’d known since grade school, since sunday school, since tee ball and ice cream and Mikey Riley’s birthday party at the arcade in the Middlesboro Mall.

“Too much whiskey last night, Crowder?”

He groaned. “Fuck, _fuck_.” He felt like he'd drunk motor oil, arsenic, hemlock. His heart was pounding to the same rhythm as his head, his whole body rebelling. Against what, he’s still not sure, the here and now or the... before, it must have been the before. So many years between.

“Something like that,” Raylan said, but he sounded like Robert, _was_ Robert too. 

“Well, get him out then. He only gets half the day. Make him punch out.”

“I gotta take him home.”

“Then you punch the fuck out, too, Givens. You think you got sick time, assholes? You think you’re workin’ for Uncle Sam?”

Raylan pulled him up and hissed, “ _Walk_ ,” in his ear. He did, not because it was Raylan telling him to--he never gave two shits what Raylan fucking Givens said to him until that day--but because it was Robert, _his Robert_ and he didn't know then how or why he knew, but he did, with the greatest of certainty and he remembers feeling so glad, so grateful.

“A second chance,” Johnny heard himself say and Robert told him to shut the fuck up.

 

Devil comes in then, presumably Raylan has driven far enough outside their perimeter that he feels comfortable to do so. He sees the glass pressed against Boyd’s lips, the jar next to him. “You kiss him goodbye?” he asks. 

Asshole.

Boyd trafficks in them these days.

He gives the boy his best feral smile. “You want your jaw broke?” he asks and thinks to himself, _if only_. 

The next day he drives up to Lexington and he gets his picture taken and he stands in a line. He thinks the offices of law enforcement haven’t changed too much in a hundred years or so. They feel about the same, just bigger, louder, bustling. Everyone inside them still give outlaws a certain look. 

And Boyd--Johnny--he’s been on both sides of it.

Raylan gives him a glare, says not to speak until they’re away from his fellow officers. He walks Boyd out of the office and down the stairs like he just came to say hello. 

Boyd wants to touch him. Raylan looks like he wants to be a thousand miles away.

There’s disappointment in Raylan’s eyes. The witness couldn’t be sure. “Can’t wait to put me behind bars, can you? Is it payback you’re wantin’?” Boyd asks with a quirk to his mouth. 

Raylan’s only response is a tightening of his lips.

Boyd slides his hands into his back pockets. Raylan looks real good again in his lawman suit and skinny-ass tie, in that damn hat. He wants to ask where the kid picked it up. It looks so much like Johnny’s old one. He has to know. He’s got to be keeping it for that, at least a little. 

Raylan meets his eyes and Boyd knows the answer would be yes if he asked, if Raylan could let himself respond, admit it.

Raylan never wanted to let go of himself enough to let it all bleed through. Boyd knows why now, but when it was so new, so fresh in his mind, he didn’t understand at all.

He didn’t understand until he saw the change in his face, a hardness grown in, but a smile like a child and so much affection in his eyes. Raylan would never look like that. He never did. He was always overtaken.

When Johnny said his name, Robert rose up, stepped in, and he didn’t like to let go again.

“Where you been?” Robert would ask, like it had just been a few minutes, hours, days only, and they were still sleeping under the stars.

But Boyd still hadn’t said his name and Raylan was holding on tight. It wouldn’t do to make a scene, not here, so he just licks his lips and smiles real big.

“Did I hear right you gave that man in Miami twenty-four hours to leave town?” Boyd asks him. “You’re takin’ cues from an _old_ play book, kid,” he says.

Raylan eyes flash. “Shut it,” he bites out. “Don’t--” he hesitates, clearly unwilling to specify, to dredge it up enough to tell him not to. “Just don’t, Boyd.” 

Boyd hears the silent plea, but he can’t listen. Not now, not after so long of this life and the other, He won’t let it slip away, not again and again, not like always.

 

Raylan is pissed. Pissed at the preacher for not IDing Boyd, pissed at Art for putting Raylan on point on it, pissed at Dan for making him come here to deal with this, but most of all pissed at Boyd for looking the way he does and smiling like they’re nineteen and eight and twelve and twenty-two and thirty-eight all over again. 

Most of all he’s pissed at Boyd for being the exact same as always and the exact opposite too. He was always contrary, more so than the other, who tried to do right, at least at the end, Raylan thinks. He can never be sure. 

Boyd is talking now, and smirking, and looking like all he wants to do is lick a line from Raylan’s collarbone to his goddamn ear. He suppresses a shiver.

“What if I were to say to you, Raylan, the same thing you said to that gun thug in Miami?”

Raylan frowns. He doesn’t know what Boyd thinks he’s playing at. Is he so committed now to playing this role, to being the bad guy? 

Raylan feels the old man creeping up again. _There ain’t no bad guys, just bad deeds, bad situations, bad aim._

“Say it then,” Raylan tells him and that echoes too, in an entirely different context.

Boyd blinks and his mouth falls open, but he gathers himself quickly and says, “You don’t wanna be here, but you got to, boy. I get it. But I’mma make it easy for you. Get outta Kentucky by tomorrow noon or I’ll come lookin’ for you.”

Raylan’s eyes widen. It can’t just be that. Boyd never wanted to just help him with this. He wants them both, wants it all and always has. Raylan couldn’t give it, couldn’t let himself be swallowed up. His grip is so tight now as it is. _Get outta town_. Jesus, everything’s an echo and he blinks to try and clear it.

“Raylan,” Boyd says. A reminder.

“Now, you’re talkin’,” Raylan forces the words between his teeth.

Boyd only looks back once as he walks away.

Ava’s on the stairs when Raylan climbs back up them, but he’s about to slip and he just sails right on by. She calls something after him, but it doesn’t seem like his name, not now.

He pushes into the bathroom and goes into a stall, in the back of his mind thinking this must be a real nice place--not like anything in Jerome--to have such a washroom. But he’s got to be in Jerome because Johnny was here. He just saw him a moment ago.

He takes off his hat and looks at it, white, no red dust to speak of, and he looks further down and sees his star and thinks, _you’re fucking Raylan Givens in fucking Lexington, Kentucky, and you’re not going to lose it in the goddamn men’s bathroom on the second floor of the courthouse._

He sits down on the toilet seat and puts his head in his hands and pushes back on everything rushing forward. He hopes to God Boyd doesn’t touch him on his quest to get him out of Kentucky or whatever it is he’s looking to do, because he’s going to get lost if they get their hands on each other.

Like he was lost the first time, when it took him so long to come back.

He hadn’t meant to smile at Boyd like that, like the old man, but he’d felt him crowding in so much since he started seeing Boyd all the time at work. Raylan thought it was just being in the mine, underground all the time, making him think of a cave in a strange, hazy way. It was never something he’d recalled before then.

But Boyd was his age, and they’d known each other for a long time. There weren’t any other young men on their crew, so they did the running a lot and worked on the line near each other. It made for drinking conversation, in addition to gossip about people they’d graduated with and various movies they couldn’t afford to go see.

Lionel Cramer dropped shit all the time. In a funny, barely dangerous way, and they’d been talking about it the night before Raylan nudged at Boyd’s ribs and smiled at him in a way the cracked the goddamn earth underneath them.

In the very next moment, Boyd’s fingers were tight in Raylan’s coveralls--the only reason he still had a handle where they were, who they were--because he was looking into Johnny’s eyes and he couldn’t imagine how he never knew before.

Boyd was drowning in it, he could see that. He _was_ Johnny then and Raylan felt this empty space inside him fill up and he thought he was going to start sobbing right there, but he couldn’t because there were people around and one of them had to keep their grip. 

It wasn’t going to be Boyd.

Raylan was slipping the whole time he talked to the foreman, wavering fast between trying to get them out and pressing down on a barrage of rage that some asshole would talk to him, them both, like they was nothing but shit scraped off his boot. If his hands weren’t busy supporting Boyd, if he’d had a gun to pull, he thinks now that man would have died.

When they did get out, Raylan stared at his truck, blinking until he was sure he could drive the damn thing. He pushed the old man down and threw the shifter into drive, peeling out fast and driving deep into the hills. They just needed to get somewhere no one could bother them for a while.

Boyd was mumbling things about second chances in the passenger seat, head in his hands but with a grin that looked like it was gonna split his face open. He reached for Raylan, like they would, sure, steady hands, but Raylan flinched away. He’d drive them off the damn road. “Don’t touch me,” he hissed.

“What the devil, R--” Boyd, Johnny, maybe, Raylan couldn’t tell, looked at him and frowned. “Where’d he go?”

Raylan stared at him, only breaking his gaze to look back at the road.

Boyd’s eyes were wide and he’d never looked so earnest, so forlorn, in his fucking life. “He was behind your eyes. He was. Bring him back.”

Raylan’s jaw dropped. “No,” he growled. He turned the truck up into Helen’s driveway and had the door open to get out before the damned thing stopped moving. Boyd was out of the cab with him, moving up fast behind him as he made for the door.

Helen was out of town for a bit, visiting an old friend who had moved away. She’d already said Raylan could use the house if he needed. She was thinking for different reasons, but he couldn’t think of a better, more urgent one than this.

“Why not?” Boyd asked, still trying to reach for him. Raylan had to fool with the key and the sticky lock, but he made the mistake of looking back at him and he was Johnny. He just was and the old man was there, climbing right up into his head, his mouth, his eyes and Johnny smiled and he really liked that.

“Robert,” Johnny--no, Boyd--was saying, like he had underground, and he thought of the cave near the copper mine and the bunk they left there with the low fire and the coffee simmering, like when they’d camped out under the stars always. “Robert, Robert,” he said again and again, “I’m _here_ ” and he finally, truly believed him.

“Johnny,” he breathed and reached for him. He felt something being pushed aside, though a moment later, he barely remembered the feeling, let alone what it might have been. 

He suddenly remembered, so clearly, the day outside their bungalow when the new boy had left off his mother’s skirts and Robert had asked for his name. Robert John Green III was a damn mouthful and his eight year old self said so. Their papas were both ranch hands now, they were going to be around each other all the time. He’d said the boy couldn’t be Robert too, that was plain confusing.

“Well, who’m I gonna be then?” he’d asked.

It didn’t take long to figure. “Johnny then,” Robert had said, smiling. “For your middle name. You’re Johnny now, got it?”

And Johnny smiled, real big and said, “Okay.” Then he shook his head and told him, “You’re a funny kid, huh?”

After that, they didn’t separate. Not for long anyway, not like this. 

“Where were you?” Robert asked as Johnny pressed him up against the door at his back. He put his hands on the boy’s face, they belonged on him.

“I don’t know,” Johnny said, shaking his head. “I’m here.”

“I looked for you. You weren’t--”

“Shut up,” Johnny said then and kissed him.

They’d kissed for the first time under the stars, like always. They’d been thirteen years old. 

They both knew it wasn’t supposed to be right, but they’d never felt like it was anything else. They felt like a train on a track, going one way and no other, inevitable. It was soft and beautiful and later it was fast and grasping and full and tight. They clung together with eyes screwed shut and fingernails dug into skin. It was always like that.

It felt the same as always, in this second chance as Johnny had named it, though Robert wasn’t sure why. Everything seemed the same as ever.

“Open the door, kid,” Johnny said to his lips.

Robert blinked, he put his hand on the knob, but it wouldn’t turn. Johnny laughed. “Where’s your head? You didn’t unlock it yet.” He leaned over and turned a key--or it looked like something on a ring of keys--then pushed the door open. “You sure she’s gone?” he asked as he walked Robert back through the door.

“Who?” Robert replied with a careless sigh. Johnny’s hands were on him, he didn’t want to talk no more. He pressed on, pulling the boy in fast and they stumbled onto a piece of furniture, huffing breathless laughs and drawing their hands all across each other’s skin.

They fell to the floor in their excitement the first time. They moaned each other’s names and panted out “missed you,” and “love you,” and “God _damn_.” And they felt young and quick and clever as before. They fumbled like the first times too, from long before, their bodies feeling new and unused to the ways of each other. Robert frowned a bit at that, but Johnny smiled like he was being an idiot and said, “What’d you expect?”

He shook his head and kissed him again, tasting him, sweet and sour, floating on a wave of affection and satisfaction and sweat. He reaches down and takes him in hand. “Wanna go again?”

The second time was slower and sweeter. Warm and heated like the cave, where Johnny would look at the fire playing across the sandy, orange rocks above their heads and say, “You cookin’ me in an oven, kid.” Slow like a roast, rich like the coffee in the pot and rare because they could only get away so much.

Away from the boys, away from the town, away away. Robert would leave his guns at the mouth of the cave, Johnny that star they pinned on him.

“Walk away,” Robert told him once, soon after they’d found the place. 

“You do it,” he’d replied.

_Wickedest town in the west_ , someone called it. 

No one could hold up a stage like Robert. Not one of those boys would let him walk away and keep his feet within that city’s limits. He ever left, he would have had to pull back East somewhere. 

No one could keep the peace like Johnny. There were bad men in the town, every town had them, Jerome just had more. There were good people there too, and it was them Johnny wouldn’t leave to hang.

So Robert stayed and he kept on and they screwed in the cave and didn’t say “I love you,” anymore.

“I made a promise,” he said. He also said, “I’m sorry,” too much. He took all the blame for the start of it all, for the rustling, for the separation. Robert once put a hand to his throat and told him, “Don’t you put all that on yourself. My choices are my own.”

“I should have gone to get you. Find you.”

“You think I could have watched _you_ hang? I would have turn tail too, Johnny. They had a rope for us both.”

Johnny kissed him then and it felt like now, like always and always when he slipped inside and they moved together, hearts beating hard in time.

Robert finished inside him with a low groan and a heavy head, Johnny spurting up between them with just a little help. His head was thrown back, his eyes closed lightly, his mouth open and wet. They collapsed together, still on the floor, on the shaggy brown rug that smelled of tobacco and cinnamon. 

They lay together, finding calm and stillness now, fingers moving only minutely across damp skin, just to be touching still, just to be near. 

Robert pillowed his head on Johnny’s shoulder. His eyes fell to the inside of the man’s forearm, where there should have been a jagged scar, all that was left of a terrifying fall from his pony when they were still boys, a break in his bone that pushed out of the skin. Robert frowned at that too, but looked away, his gaze searching the room.

“Place is nice,” he said lazily. “Who’s is it, anyway?”

Johnny laughed and nudged him. “Funny.”

He furrowed his brow and propped himself up on his arm. “What’s funny? I was jus’ askin’. Christ Almighty.”

Johnny made a noise then, like a strangled choke and he pulled away, sitting up and pulling Robert with him. His hands came up to the side of Robert’s face and he looked almost scared. 

“Johnny, what?” he breathed.

“You swallowed him whole, didn’t you?” His voice is full of awe and real fear now. “Is he going to come back?”

Robert tried to shake free, feeling something strange churn in his stomach, roil, like it wanted to claw its way out. “Who’re you talkin’ about now?”

“Raylan,” Johnny whispered and he looked like somebody else for a moment. “You’re gonna let him come back, aren’t you?” 

Robert didn’t know what he was talking about at all.

Something hard and prideful came into Johnny’s face then and Robert thought he must be somebody else. “I didn’t understand,” Johnny said softly. “I’m gonna need to talk to him about these matters, Robert.”

“What do you think I can do?” He didn’t want to pull away, but he didn’t like this Johnny, didn’t like his colder eyes.

“You can let him come back,” he replied and there was a careful patience to his tone, as though it were balanced on the edge of a knife. “Listen to me, _Raylan_ , you know this house, don’t you?”

“No,” Robert denies, though he remembers the feel of this carpet, or his knees do. His hand knows the rough pattern on the lumpy blue couch. “I’ve never been here before.”

“You drove us here. Yes, you have. This is your Aunt Helen’s house in Harlan County, U.S.A, motherfucker. We ain’t in Amarillo no more, son, we ain’t in Jerome either, so you come the fuck back, Raylan Givens, because I languished nineteen years in ignorance to have this goddamn conversation with you, so you better show the fuck up already.”

He gasped then, hard and sharp and all his muscles tensed at once. He locked his gaze onto the deep set hazel eyes in front of him and protested, “I didn’t fucking know he was _you_ , asshole,” and his eyes rolled back in his head.

His head was splitting in half then, is now, or feels like it is.

He’s cradling it in his hands, whose hands they are, he doesn’t even care. He’s just hoping he doesn’t have to call for a doctor--or an ambulance, shit-- when his phone rings. It takes him a half-minute to realize what the hell the sound even is. 

He stares at for what feels like a while before pressing the button to answer and says “hello,” like a damn moron.

“Raylan?” a surly voice comes over the line. “You get lost on your way back up the stairs?”

“No,” he denies immediately, but he’s not sure he’s able to completely hide the confusion he’s still feeling.

“Boyd Crowder got some kind of weapon held on you?”

“No,” he says again.

“Well, I got some shit to tell you and you’ve got some paperwork to fill out, so get the hell back up here, pronto.”

He breathes out steadily, a calming breath. “All right,” he says and hangs up.

He runs into a woman just outside the bathroom and for a moment he can’t place her. 

“Oh, hey,” she says. She looks like one of the girls from the Saloon in Jerome, but she’s got smaller tits and nicer teeth. She gives him a funny look when he doesn’t say anything. “I heard you were back in town.”

“Yeah,” he says, feeling lost. He’s been back in a lot of places before. He hasn't quite got a grasp still on which one this is.

She throws him a look of concern and hesitates before putting a hand on his arm. It grounds him immediately and he knows her. Winona.

“You okay? You got that look on your face,” she tells him. He once got drunk and spent an hour talking to her about the best way to rob a stage. In the morning, he told her he watched a lot of movies. But she always knew he’d wander away sometimes. He did it a lot when they lived in Texas. She never asked why he’d put in for the transfer six months after they got there.

“This case,” he says and doesn’t know why, “they got me tangling with an old friend.”

“That’s rough,” she says and her hand is still on him.

He pulls away slow. “Thanks,” he says and means two different things. She left him because he wouldn’t tell her. She never said so, but he got that. He decided after it was better that way. “See you ‘round.”

When he gets upstairs, he knows it was Art he was talking to as the man gives him a quick look, then a double take and a hard frown. “You comin’ down with something?”

He doesn’t reply. Doesn’t trust himself.

“You look like shit, son.” Art turns a discerning eye on him, one that Raylan doesn’t like at all. “You don’t look like yourself,” he says finally, like he knows that sounds crazy. 

Raylan almost laughs, but he just puts a hand to his head. He’s surprised his brains aren’t running out his nose, bloody and trailing behind him all over the floor.

“Go home, all right?” the man looks truly worried. “This shit can wait.”

Raylan walks out of the office without a word. It’s not until he’s in his car, pulling out of the parking lot, that it dawns on him, he might have wanted to tell Art about Boyd’s threat.

When he gets back to the shitty motel room he’s rented in town, he tries, briefly, to keep himself awake, but his body is as exhausted as his mind. He looks around his room and thinks it doesn’t look so different from a rat trap he’d stayed in a few times in Yuma, scouting out the stage routes to the towns the railroad couldn’t get to.

He shakes his head after a minute and flips on the radio, letting the sound of static and wavering rock and roll oldies drift through the room. That hadn’t been in Yuma and neither had he.

He falls asleep to it, fully clothed on top of the sheets.

He dreams of red dirt windswept into the corner of his room and a scorpion climbing up onto the pile. He dreams of a town on fire and a gun pointing the wrong way, his lips pulled around it, his teeth set on the barrel. He hears Johnny cry, “ _Don’t_ ,” and it sounds like a knock on his door.

 

Boyd doesn’t want Raylan to leave again.

It’s the last thing in the world that he wants. He thought he couldn’t let this go, not again. But he’s wavering now that he watched Raylan fight to keep it down, to keep hold of himself, in the middle of the courthouse after only so much as talking to him for five minutes.

It never used to be like that. Not quite.

They could always talk about it, however much Raylan hadn’t wanted to. They were the only ones who could know.

After Robert’s eyes had rolled back in his head, after the first time, Raylan’s blinked open, and looked up at him hazily. He’d frowned, just softly, as though looking through foggy glass, or coming about of a dream.

“He was here,” the boy murmured, like he couldn’t believe it. “In my mouth and my eyes. I saw what he wanted and he--he’s never done that before.” 

“You’ve always known about him?”

Raylan blinked and a little more awareness came into his expression. He looked at Boyd, gazed at him, until his eyes widened and his mouth parted. He’d just remembered it all. “Oh, shit,” he said.

Boyd smiled grimly. “That about sums it up, son.”

Raylan tried to sit up then, raising his head and shoulders from the floor. Boyd pushed him back. “Take it easy, Raylan.”

Raylan frowned at him again and he began to breathe hard through his nose. There was real fear burgeoning in his expression and Boyd felt something sharp and painful in his chest at the sight. This was Robert, this was Raylan. This was very, very real.

Raylan shook his head. “You’re looking at me like you looked at him,” he said. “Stop it.”

“You remember then? What we did? Who... who we were?” It felt so strange to say it, but it shouldn’t have been anything else.

“Stop it,” Raylan said again, like he hadn’t heard him. They stared at each other for a long moment, then he added, “It’s not _me_.”

Boyd didn’t believe him. Still doesn’t.

Raylan must have realized, because he began to talk, ramblingly. “I used to think, like you, like you must be, that we’re the same. It’s easy to think that, he’s in you, but he’s not the same. Makes you do things you wouldn’t, things you don’t want, wouldn’t want.” He shook his head, blinking fast and holding himself very still. “Things that get you in trouble, funny looks, bad things.” 

Boyd’s mouth parted wanting to reach out, soothe Raylan’s obviously increasing anxiety. He didn’t think it was just Johnny who wanted that. He was Boyd. He was talking to Raylan who looked so damn scared in that moment. “How long have you been living with this?” he asked.

Raylan’s hands were shaking. “You can’t tell,” he said, talking to himself more than to Boyd. “No one would believe you.”

Boyd didn’t ask why Raylan would even think Johnny was capable of that kind of betrayal. They’d never told anyone anything that would betray the other, not even with ropes around their necks and guns at their backs. Not even at the end, though by then he supposed some had to have guessed. They weren’t there for the fall out.

He didn’t ask why Raylan, or Robert at least, hadn’t yet tried to apologize. They were always trying to push those on each other.

He only asked again, “How long?”

Raylan eyes were wide and desperate. “Always,” he said. “Since I can remember.”

“You been alone with this?” Boyd had asked, stupidly. It was obvious. But he thought about the end and added, “With everything?”

Raylan had just blinked at him, uncomprehending.

“The end, Raylan, do you remember how you died?”

“That wasn’t me,” he insisted without answering.

“But do you remember?” There should be a guilt behind his eyes, which are so like Robert’s he can’t stand it. He remembers them well. They were the last thing he’d seen before he went. They were wide open, like now, but lifeless.

“No,” Raylan said finally, looking now at Boyd like he might be of some use, instead of another heavy burden, another source of fear and frustration. “Was it the fire? I... sometimes dream about flames high as the houses, horses trapped in Doyle’s stables.”

Boyd closed his eyes and saw the gun in Robert’s hand, a trail of smoke leaving the barrel, Robert’s eyes as he realized and then--

“Yes,” he said. “It was the fire, caused it.”

“You saw? I mean--he--”

“Johnny saw it. But it...took them both. The fire.” He smiled softly and touched Raylan’s face, lightly, and he didn’t pull away. Boyd Crowder was a much better liar than Johnny Green had ever been.

Boyd can still feel the ache of that stab of guilt for all the loneliness and fear that he must have gone through with Robert in his head. He doesn’t wonder why Raylan reacted the way he did to it all, pushing it down and making it something foreign, intrusive, unwelcome. 

He’s never known how to make him see. Sometimes he wonders if Robert himself has a ghostly hand in it, if Robert can’t let Raylan live with him the way Boyd does with Johnny. 

He turns the car around about an hour outside of Lexington, unable to let it lie so easy, unable to let himself give up without making sure.

 

Boyd drives to Raylan’s motel.

He had Devil find and check out the place while he was in the lineup and made sure the man drove back down to Harlan on his own.

He notices Raylan’s car is parked outside, though it’s too early for him to be off work. He’d been planning to just sit outside and wait for the man to return, but Boyd thinks about Raylan’s drawn face and the detached look in his eyes as he walked away. Maybe he couldn’t hold onto him.

Boyd tries the door and finds it unlocked.

He steps through and finds Raylan passed out on top of his bed, radio flickering through static at his ear. 

When they were young, Raylan would crank the radio wherever they drove. He’d say, “Couldn’t get that in your goddamn desert.” Boyd would never say the desert wasn’t his, Raylan did know that, he thought. If anything, they both once belonged to the prairie and now, of course, to the hills.

Boyd remembers, when Raylan would talk shit, it was always about Jerome. Which made sense, because Robert had never liked it, hadn’t liked anything after he got away from the gallows in Abilene, except for their time in the cave. He’d only stayed in Arizona for Johnny and Johnny had stayed because he was too good and because he’d made a promise.

Boyd learned his lesson then. He wasn’t good, had never tried to be, and he only ever made promises to Raylan.

Raylan stirs on the bed and opens his eyes. Boyd can see Robert there, near the surface, can see the pain in Raylan’s face.

“You left your door unlocked,” Boyd says quietly and walks in, shutting the door behind him.

Raylan closes his eyes again, exhausted. He used to say it felt like a migraine, like the other was trying to drive a nail through his head from the inside and his body would rebel, would strain and sweat and shudder to keep him hemmed in. 

“He always forgets shit like that,” he mumbles.

Robert never had to worry in Jerome, never owned a house, always lived with nothing to steal or nobody who would want to. What money he had, he kept in the ground.

“He was up in you?” Boyd asks.

Raylan gives a slow, tiny shake of his head. “He was close. He’s so close, Boyd.”

Boyd can’t help but think of the time, so close to when Raylan left, when the men at Turtle Creek struck out and Boyd and Raylan struck with them. 

When the crowd roiled to keep out the scabs and the gun thugs struck down Paddy Kearney, the only thing Boyd could think of was making sure Raylan got out. They’d been separated by the rush to fight and they pushed towards each other, the fear in Raylan’s eyes battling Robert for supremacy. Boyd could see it, even from a distance, and Johnny knew the stupid kid wouldn’t stand to see him hurt. There would have been a river of blood at his feet and they would have him taken away.

So Boyd had fought his way through the crowd and to him. He reached for Raylan, knowing that Robert was just there, wanting him so badly. He pulled the boy close and whispered in his ear, taking the baseball bat from his hands, “I’m sorry. You’ll know why,” then pushed him back and brought the weapon down across his head.

He caught his limp body, head lolling onto his shoulder, in the chaos around them and snagged the arm of the first man he saw high-tailing it out of there. 

“Police on their way,” Shelby told him, then stopped, looking at Raylan. Boyd shoved the boy into Shelby’s arms and said, “Help me take him to his aunt, please, Shelby,” and there must have been something horrible in Boyd’s eyes because Shelby just nodded. 

Boyd bent to pick up the bat where he’d dropped it under Raylan’s weight, but he should never have done that because one of the thugs came up behind him and would have got him just as bad as Raylan had it not been for Shelby’s shout. Instead, Boyd dodged and got clocked good across the back, knocking him to the mud in the yard. The sirens were howling and the police cars were just up the ridge, racing down to them, so Boyd kicked out at his assailant’s shin and twisted away from his grasping hands, calling to Shelby, “Get the fuck out.”

He got himself up a moment later and slugged the thug hard enough to knock him down, but he couldn’t get away from the law. They locked him up for two nights and three days and only let him out because they’d already charged as many men as the court could handle.

Boyd went straight to Helen’s.

He breezed past her towards the room where Raylan stayed so often now, ignoring her call of, “He’s got a cold or something. He won’t eat.”

The room was too warm and smelled stale when he entered it. He met Raylan’s eyes, dark slits of fear and pain, where they peered out from under his ratty comforter as he lay curled up on the bed. 

“I’m here,” he said and went to him.

Raylan sat up, putting a hand to his head, and stared at Boyd as he sat down on the edge of the mattress. When he reached for him, Raylan held himself away. “I can’t do this... Boyd, I’m so tired. He knew. He knew you were locked up. He wants--I didn’t--didn’t know what he would do.”

“I know. I’m here now, darlin’,” Boyd murmured. “I won’t let him do anything you wouldn’t want. I promise.”

Raylan’s eyes grew dark at the sound of Boyd’s voice, soft like Johnny’s, calling him dear names and looking like he did. Boyd couldn’t ever help it. They’re the same. He loves them both.

“Just let go for a while,” Boyd said. “I won’t let him do anything, Raylan.”

Raylan shook his head. “What about Helen?”

“She won’t come in. I’ll keep her out.”

“It’s her house, asshole.”

“She does come in, I’ll coach him through it. He won’t say much. He’ll be puking or something. She thinks you’re sick. Raylan--”

“You just want him here, for yourself,” Raylan said in a low, unhappy voice.

Boyd’s mouth was a thin, tight line when he responded. “I won’t lie to you. I do long for him, but I don’t want to see you kill yourself over keeping him away. He’s--”

“Not me, Boyd. _He isn’t_.” Raylan’s eyes were desperate, fevered with exhaustion.

“So you say,” Boyd told him softly and moved forward. “Come here.”

Raylan curled further in on himself, but left room for Boyd to slide in beneath him. He pulled the boy’s head into his lap, let his fingers comb through sweat-soaked hair. “Let it go, R--” Boyd’s voice broke. He’d promised Raylan when all this began, he wouldn’t call Robert out. They realized after the first time, Boyd has that power and he had said, with Raylan’s hand on his throat, he wouldn’t ever do it. 

“Let it go, darlin’. I got you.” He felt Raylan let out a sigh, deep and heavy, and he relaxed across Boyd’s legs.

He was still for a few moments and Boyd had thought he’d gone to sleep, but then he stirred and smiled, lifting his eyes up to Boyd’s. Robert was there. 

“You’re here,” he said softly, lacing his fingers through Boyd’s.

Boyd smiled back. “Yeah,” he said.

Robert frowned then, in that strained, confused way he’d get sometimes. “You were.. in trouble? Danger?”

Boyd tightened his lips and shook his head. “No, it was nothing, kid. Don’t fret.”

Robert grinned now and twisted in Boyd’s lap, sitting up swiftly, like nothing had ever been wrong. He leaned in fast and kissed Boyd on the lips. Boyd made himself not pull away.

It was disconcerting now, increasingly so, that Robert was so different from Raylan, so outside of him. It was like talking to another person, though he knew, Johnny knew, that they were still the same. Raylan rarely let Robert overcome him, so it was strange to see him. Even more strange was that Robert’s memories of Raylan’s life were superficial at best, fleeting, and utterly inconsequential to him.

He knew nothing of Raylan, save what he knew of Boyd, who he always called Johnny.

It was like dealing with an Alzheimer's patient with a face far too young.

“What’s wrong?” Robert asked him, sidling close, flirtatiously. 

Boyd shook his head again. He could never tell Robert. Whenever he tried to it was all low brows and fierce denials and raw confusion. Nothing Raylan’s poor body needed to deal with. Nothing Boyd wanted him to remember of Robert. Because Raylan remembered everything, even when it was only Robert looking out of his eyes, guiding his limbs, his hands, his lips.

Boyd knew Raylan remembered. But Boyd and Raylan’s intimacy was a thing of borderlands and frayed control and thinned, invisible lines. Robert was too much in their minds.

Boyd shook his head, took Robert’s face in his hands, gentle and welcoming. “Nothing, kid. I told you.”

Robert said, “I don’t believe you,” though he was smiling. He drew his fingers up Boyd’s bare arms, but there was a tremor in them. Raylan had barely slept. His body was going to shut down soon.

So, Boyd blinked at him, then laid his forehead on Robert’s shoulder, breathing deep and long. “I’m tired, Robert. Some--some shit went down--”

“They locked you up,” he said, interrupting as though he’d just remembered.

Boyd rocked his head from side to side, grasping a little harder at Robert. “I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to lay with you, please, Robert.”

And so they laid together and they held each other. When Helen knocked on the door, Boyd lifted his head and whispered urgently, “If you ever loved me, you will pretend you’re asleep, Robert, I swear to God.”

“Who is it?”

“No one you know,” Boyd hissed at him. “Do it, kid, I’m begging you.”

Robert gave him a dubious look, but laid himself down, contrarily in just the same way as when Johnny had thrown him in lock up for the night in Jerome so long ago. His back was pressed up against Helen's wooden headboard, his head pillowed in his arms. Boyd scoffed at him and went to the door before Helen could get it all the way open.

Helen's worried face only came halfway through before Boyd was there, matching her concerned look and putting his arm between her and the door. Her expression darkened and he could tell she was about to come down on him, so he said, “I think he’s got a fever. He just fell asleep.”

Helen’s eyes fell to Robert, eyes shut and motionless on the bed, and he saw them soften. “He wouldn’t let me come in, hollered at me to stay out. He’s been in here for days.”

“I don’t know, Helen,” Boyd made himself say. “He asked me to stay. Do you mind?”

She shook her head and turned away. “Tell him to come out when he wants something to eat. And that his mother wants to know where he is.”

Boyd gave her a weak smile. “I will.”

He closed the door behind her and went back to the bed only to find Robert actually asleep. He’d shifted into a more comfortable position, splayed out across the width of the bed, feet extended past the side on top of the blankets. He was breathing easy and the crease in his brow was virtually gone.

Not sure what else to do with himself, Boyd had laid down next to him and watched him sleep until he dozed off himself.

He had a dream that night of counting stars with Robert. He watched as one of them fell to pierce his breast, silver and bright and the most painful thing he’d ever felt--but only for a moment. It melted then, the silver, quick and flowing, and it became beautiful and warm all through his veins. 

Boyd stirred when he felt the body next to him stiffen and jerk awake, as though emerging from a nightmare. Raylan’s eyes were wide and almost afraid, but Boyd knew it was him immediately. Raylan’s eyes were always so much younger.

“All right?” Boyd whispered and didn’t reach for him.

“I was dreamin’ ‘bout a fire,” Raylan said, hand roving over his mouth and up across his brow.

Boyd frowned and he was going to ask, but Raylan’s expression changed then, as though he was suddenly remembering all that had happened. He looked at Boyd, jaw slack in something like awe. He took a breath, shut his mouth and opened it again, hesitation in his expression as he finally said, “Thank you, Boyd. You,” he frowned, guilt edging into his eyes as he continued, “you always take care of me. O-of him,” he quickly corrected. “I know--I know why you do, but, thank you anyway.”

Boyd smiled at him sadly, thinking of times when there would have been no thought of debt or due between them, no separation, no difference. “There’s no need to thank me, Raylan. You know.”

Raylan looked away. They both knew he remembered too.

He took Boyd’s hand in his, unexpectedly and quickly, like he was ripping a bandage off tender skin and he leaned in close, eyes never leaving Boyd’s. “I’ll do it anyway,” he said softly and kissed him.

Robert was far away. Boyd could tell. It was only Raylan with him, lips soft and uncertain, hand tightening in his, as if just by instinct and loosened desire. The kiss itself felt like hours, but Boyd knew it broke quickly, with Raylan dipping his head down and away, as if ashamed or frightened. Boyd let his lips fall to the top of his boy’s head and he heard Raylan’s slight intake of breath.

“You ain’t slept more ‘n an hour, Raylan,” Boyd told him, still soft. “I’ll stay. I’ll make sure you’re all right.”

Raylan thrust his bent head forward, pressing his face into Boyd’s shoulder and letting out a ragged sigh. “I have to get away from this,” he murmured, voice muted, lips pressed to Boyd’s shirt. “I can’t, Boyd--can’t do this anymore.”

It wasn’t always so difficult. They’d been living with this for months now and Raylan could usually keep him down, with the radio and with Boyd to remind him, to call Raylan’s name. 

He’d done it because that’s what Raylan needed, like everything he’d done that day and at the mine. But things were getting more dangerous, Boyd couldn’t stay out of Bo’s business for much longer and Raylan--Robert too--wouldn’t have him in constant danger like that, wouldn’t be able to keep it contained.

Boyd held Raylan through that night, but he left at dawn, before the boy woke again and found Helen in the kitchen. He looked sadly at her, as she crushed a butt into an overflowing ashtray, and said, “You have to help him get out.”

She’d glared hard at him then and replied, “You think I don’t know that?”

“You’re waiting for him to come to you.” Boyd turned toward the door and said over a shoulder wanting to bow in defeat. “Don’t. What he needs is a goddamn push.”

 

And Boyd had let Raylan go and he had waited for him, to come back or not, as he wished. 

Raylan is here now, though not by his own choice, and everything is just as shit as it had been before. Boyd looks down at him, curled up on the bed just like the boy he was, and knows what he has to do.

If Raylan can’t leave, Boyd will have to and he’ll have to do it in a way everyone will believe. He can’t just skip town like a kid, people will find him, try to bring him back, outlaws and federals alike.

Raylan looks up again at him and frowns, creasing his brow even further. “What are you doing here? What about my twenty-four hours?”

Boyd’s here to say goodbye, the way he wants to, but he won’t tell Raylan that. Robert either.

Boyd walks further into the room, swiping a glass off Raylan’s table, and filling it with water from the tap. He walks back and hands it to Raylan, who looks at it like there must be poison in it. Boyd smiles, saying nothing, until Raylan takes it and drinks nearly the whole thing in several large gulps.

Boyd lets a silent, not quite tense moment pass before he tells Raylan, “I want to talk to him.”

Something hard and stubborn comes into Raylan’s eyes and he sits up, limbs tense and rigid as he tries to pull himself together. He looks right into Boyd’s eyes and says, “Are you out of your mind, son? Why would I do that?”

Boyd doesn’t try to hide the pity from his expression, or the plea. “I’ve done a great many things for you, Raylan. Things you’ve thanked me for before today. Will you do this for me? Please.”

Raylan is angry, frightened, and Boyd knows he’s trying to hide it with a mask of self-righteous confusion. “You’re asking me to give myself over to him? For what? So you can get yourself off with your ghost boyfriend? Christ, Boyd.”

“He may mean nothing to you, for all he’s been with you your entire life--even if you don’t believe he’s--dammit.” Boyd shakes his head. He can’t get into this debate with Raylan, shouldn’t if he’s going to get what he wants. He forges on, “But you know what he was to me, Raylan. I’d like to see him again. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Raylan turns away for a moment, braces his forehead in his hands, as though it’s paining him. “I can’t. I can’t, Boyd. He’s not me. He’s--it’s too much. An’ the echo,” he mumbles, “it’s so _loud_.”

Boyd frowns and steps nearer to him. He could reach out and touch Raylan’s shoulder now, if he thought Raylan could stand it. He’s never talked about an echo before. “What echo?” Boyd asks softly.

Raylan doesn’t want to answer. His lips are tightly sealed, his eyes pleading, just as Boyd’s had done. Boyd knows he hadn’t meant to say that. 

“Raylan,” Boyd says his name clear and plaintive. “What do you mean?”

“Everything he did, I know. Everything he felt, I can feel it,” Raylan answers, his voice breaking. “When I talk to you, Boyd--Johnny,” he grinds out the name, like it was forced through his teeth. He never calls him by that name. “When I look at you, Boyd, I feel the past, but it’s here and now too and--” He shakes his head again, like he might knock it all loose. “It’s all his and not mine, everything--I can’t--please, don’t ask me. Please.”

Boyd doesn’t understand. Raylan never told him this. How can Raylan feel it too, know it all and feel it all without Robert there and not realize? He takes the last step towards the bed, towards Raylan and kneels before him, taking him by the shoulders. He says, “Raylan, to me, this isn’t just an echo, it’s not _only_ him. The past is the present. I’m Johnny Green the same way, the same time, that I’m Boyd Crowder. I know you know that about me. And I can’t listen to a goddamn word you say, Raylan, without hearing him. He’s in you. He _is_ you. Why don’t you see that? How can you feel what he felt and not know?”

Boyd isn’t sure why Raylan hasn’t pulled away, but he tightens his grip on the man’s shoulders regardless. 

“What the hell are you talking about?” Raylan snarls. “You know, Boyd. You _know_ when he’s here I’m fucking gone--”

“But you remember, don’t you? You remember everything. Better than I do sometimes. And you just told me you feel it. It’s no echo, son. It’s _you_. How can you think he’s not a part of you?”

“He’s not any part that I want,” Raylan growls. Boyd can tell he’s lying, but not why. Raylan keeps going, words falling from his mouth in a terrible deluge of viciousness and something bordering on terror. “He’s a criminal and a selfish asshole and a--and he’s a piss poor shot when it counts--”

Boyd has pushed Raylan back on the bed, climbing half up himself on top of him, before he can think about it, everything coming together all at once. “That’s it, isn’t it?” he demands, thinking of fire and screams and a gun in Robert’s hand. He doesn’t realize he’s started talking to Robert until it’s too late to take the words back. “This is your punishment? To force him to keep it back, to make it too strong to handle. You can have this but you’ve worked it out so you don’t fucking want it because it’s too good for you now?”

Raylan’s shaking his head, trying to get out from under where Boyd has trapped him. The terror in his eyes is real now, but Boyd is too angry at Robert to back off. 

“You don’t think you suffered enough in the aftermath, you got to do it in the afterlife or whatever the hell we’ve got here? You’ve got to make this boy’s life just as shit as before because he’s you and you don’t deserve a second chance, well, fuck it Robert, that’s _bullshit_.”

“I-I don’t know, Boyd, please.” Raylan insists. “Are you talking about the end? I never remember the end, I told you that. I can’t-- I don’t know.”

Boyd backs off then, eyes wide. “I called him,” he says softly, realizing. “Where is he?”

Raylan’s expression is still fearful. “I don’t know. He was close, but now he’s--he’s not.”

Boyd draws his hands up to Raylan’s face, suddenly very aware that he’s practically straddling him. He looks into Raylan’s eyes. “But you’re here. And you remember everything he does, don’t you? You can feel it. You said you could.”

“Stop,” Raylan begs. He leans away, but Boyd’s hands follow him. “Boyd,” he says.

“You know, I noticed you. Before him.” Raylan’s eyes widen. He must not be aware his fingers are clutching Boyd’s hips. “I did,” Boyd tells him. “I thought--I always loved your smile. It’s just like his, but I didn’t know that Raylan. Then, it was just yours.”

Raylan takes in a breath. “It’s not just here,” he admits, dropping his eyes and leaning forward to press his forehead to Boyd’s chest, where he can feel his heart beating, faster and faster. “It was school, Salt Lake, Texas--so much we had to leave--and Miami too. Everywhere. He only comes up for you though. He’s always looking for you.”

Boyd wraps his arms around Raylan, but doesn’t pull him any closer. “I’m so sorry, darlin’.”

“I never blamed you,” Raylan says.

“Thank you for that. You could have, easily.”

Raylan looks up and shakes his head. “No,” he says frowning. “No, I couldn’t have. I don’t know if-if he wouldn’t let me or...I know you, Boyd. I know it wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

Boyd can’t help it then. He wants so much and he sees that want echoed in Raylan’s eyes, either from the long years, or just the twenty between the two of them. He closes the distance. He presses his lips to Raylan’s.

Raylan pushes up, craning his neck through the kiss and opening his lips for Boyd, breathing in deep through his nose, and drawing shaking fingers up to Boyd’s face. They kiss long and slow, a low burning heat, cultivated for so so long. They rock together, pressing closer. Boyd can feel Raylan’s hard on and is too frightened of scaring him off to do anything but think about touching him. He groans into Raylan’s mouth.

It’s too soon that Raylan pulls away, blinking slowly, a hazy fog filling his eyes. “He’s here again,” he murmurs. “He wants you.”

Boyd smiles sadly. He grazes his fingers across the skin at the nape of Raylan’s neck. “And you don’t?”

Raylan shakes his head. “Maybe,” he says, closing his eyes. “He wants it more.”

Boyd’s brows crease at that. He won’t offer him any more pity, but he wishes he could. Robert never gave Raylan a chance. Boyd knows he need to suss this out. “Let me talk to him, Raylan. Please. We need to talk.”

“About those things you said?” Raylan’s voice has never sounded so uncertain.

Boyd nods. “Yes. I need to know if he's keeping things from you. If there’s something that can be done to fix this.”

Raylan’s expression is bewildered, maybe more so because Robert’s pushing up on him so hard now. Boyd can see an urgency behind his eyes, hidden in his expression, a need. “How could he do that?” Raylan asks. “What could we do?”

Boyd kisses his forehead, feeling for once a tiny burst of hope. He says, “Let me find out, Raylan.”

Raylan takes a breath and nods, lifting his face once more to meet Boyd’s lips with his own.

“Thank you,” Boyd breathes into the kiss. “Thank you, thank you.” Raylan tastes just like he used to, strong and almost salty, and he kisses like they’ve never done it before, until he stills for only a moment, then pulls Boyd roughly closer, harder, like he knows him far too well.

“Where you been?” Robert murmurs lazily, as though all the time and none at all has passed. 

Boyd can’t help but smile. “Wasn’t me that was gone, kid,” he says and pulls away enough to look at him. 

He remembers it was always easy to tell when Robert was there because his eyes were so much older than Raylan’s, but it’s not so any longer. Boyd knows they’re the same age now, older, than the end of those years that once seemed so long. Robert looks young to him now, almost childlike and small in comparison to the pain Raylan’s endured on account of him.

“You finally got away from them nail-biters,” he says, smiling. 

Boyd snorts half a laugh at the long forgotten name Robert had for the people of Jerome, the ones who weren’t outlaws, who mined the copper, who ran their shops and businesses and lived their lives. He called them nail-biters because they didn’t do anything but watch Johnny do his job for them. He always said, they were living in a town like Jerome, they should arm themselves, keep an eye out, try and help at least.

Some of them had. Some of them died, too. 

Johnny hadn’t liked that. Boyd shakes his head, remembering. He’d been too good a boy. He always thought, in this life, he’d got himself into a way he could get what he wanted, and not worry about anybody else except Raylan. 

Robert seems to have ruined that for him.

“No, Robert,” Boyd sighs. “We ain’t in the cave no more.” Boyd remembers when Johnny came through, he saw the past too. He wonders now, having never thought of it before, if that’s all Robert ever saw, all he’s seeing now.

Robert frowns, that old confusion clouding his gaze. “You get us a room? Ain’t they--”

Boyd just kisses him to shut him up. He pulls back when Robert tries to draw him further up, like he used to before flipping him on the bed. “I got to talk to you, kid,” he tells him.

“What about?” Robert never liked talking much.

“The end,” Boyd says quietly, drawing Robert’s eyes to his with a crooked finger under his chin. “You remember it?”

Robert smiles, as though Boyd’s making some kind of joke. “What are you jawin’ on? End of what?”

Boyd lets his finger roam up to his hairline, across his brow and into his hair. Robert closes his dark eyes, too playful for this time, too eager to forget. “End of us, kid. End of everything. Tell me you remember.”

Robert tilts his head, in just Raylan’s way, and Boyd can’t recall if it was Robert's gesture first or not. "What are we doin' here then if it's ended?"

“It ain't just us here, Robert.” Boyd says, a rising impatience in his voice. “It's Boyd and Raylan, too. It’s ended, but it ain’t over.” He thinks, perhaps it will never be over. “Please, tell me you know him, even if you never say.”

Robert is staring at him like he hasn’t the vaguest idea what he might be talking about, so Boyd grabs at his hand, the right one, and presses his thumb down hard on the silver ring there, holding it still for Robert to see. “This ain’t yours, Robert,” he says. “You never wore a thing like this a day in your life. Where did it come from?”

Robert stares down at his hand. “I don’t know,” he says frowning. 

Boyd doesn’t know either. Raylan must have come by it in his travels, in his life away from Harlan. “You can find out,” he tells Robert softly. “I need to know, kid. Find out for me.”

Robert shakes his head, but Boyd leans in close, he draws his hands down to the fly of his boy’s jeans. He ghosts his fingers there, teasing, and he whispers, “Please, Robert, you can find out for me. Where did he get it?”

“Who?”

“You know,” Boyd insists, his voice breathy in Roberts ear, his hands working harder, now slipped inside his waistband. Robert groans. “Close your eyes,” Boyd tells him. “You know, darlin’. Think about it.”

Robert’s breath hitches and his mouth falls open, his hands are on either side of Boyd’s face. “H-he picked it up at a flea market. Salt Lake. Was-was with a pretty girl. He just liked it.”

Boyd smiles, just liked something enough to wear it for fifteen years. That seemed like him. “Who did?” he asks softly.

Robert tries to shake his head, but Boyd presses their foreheads together, as though he can push the knowledge, the acceptance there. As though his touch will make it right. “The Marshal,” Robert says, slowly, like the words are being drawn from him, unbidden. “The boy.”

“Tell me his name.”

Robert tries to twist away, but Boyd’s hand comes up, grasping hard at his hair, keeping his head still, even as the other continues to tease at his cock. “Why?” Robert whines.

“Tell me,” Boyd demands, voice now desperate. “You know. You’ve always known, Robert. We can’t do it this way anymore.”

“Raylan,” he finally spits it out like a curse and gasps when Boyd takes his hand from him.

Seizing his head once more, he forces Robert’s gaze up at him and says, “Now look at me.”

When Robert opens his eyes, his brows come down in still more confusion and something terrible and disturbed comes into his expression. “No, no, no,” he cries, like he’s lost something. He clutches at Boyd’s arms, hissing, “Where is he? What have you done to him?”

Boyd tries to pull back. Robert’s grip is vice-like, painful. His eyes are frightening. “Nothing,” he says. “I’m here.”

Robert shakes his head, denial rife in his hands and eyes, in the tension of every one of his muscles. “He’s gone. Johnny. What have you done to him? He was here. He was.”

Boyd makes himself push closer. He tries to smile. He puts all of Johnny he can into his eyes, into his voice. “Robert, I’m here. I haven’t done anything.”

Robert’s hand comes around his throat before he can think to scramble back, violence in his expression, fear and hatred battling in his eyes. His thumb is jutting hard into Boyd’s jugular as he spins them around, thrusting Boyd onto his back on the bed. “You’re a liar, boy,” he seethes, looming over him. “You’re not Johnny.”

There is no recognition in Robert’s eyes, only fury, the kind Johnny had only seen there once, when Robert had nearly beat a man dead in the saloon in Jerome, the day Johnny had pointed a gun at him and locked him in the jail for the night. Robert had refused to tell him what it was the man had said or done. The man himself, a ranch hand from miles and miles away, had bit his tongue in the fight and never spoke a clear word again.

Boyd holds his hands above his head, he forces his body to relax and raises his chin, letting Robert squeeze as much as he likes. Robert does give him enough room to croak, “Kid, Robert, come back t’ th’ cave wit’ me. Please. One more time.” 

Boyd is lightheaded. He closes his eyes and can see it too. The red desert rock is like a womb around them, warm from their fire, the heat of their bodies. The pallet Robert’s brought isn’t so soft as Johnny’s bed, but he’d rather have it than anything else. He’d rather have Robert all the time and sleep on a bed of nails, of coals, than once a month in secret and have his clean room and soft mattress that Mary puts up for him in the hotel.

Johnny raises a hand to Robert’s face, draws his thumb across the hard line of his cheekbone, his jaw. “I love you,” he says. He’d always wanted to say it here, never thought he had the right.

Robert’s grip eases, but then he blinks and shakes his head in vehement denial. “I can’t see it,” he says, voice a harsh whisper. “W-we’re not there. You’re _not_ him.” He presses down again and Boyd’s body fights back of its own volition, against death. “ _Where is he?_ ” Robert demands.

Boyd sees his eyes go to the nightstand, where Raylan had left his sidearm. He coughs a groan of fear, he pushes uselessly on Robert’s hands. “Nnnngh,” he tries to tell him ‘no’.

Robert leans over and reaches for the weapon and Boyd is able to loosen his hold. He’s got the gun in his hand as Boyd coughs and sputters and calls desperately for Raylan. 

He loses track of how many times he’s called Raylan’s name, hurried and terrified, knowing exactly what Robert will do, all the things he’s done before. Robert’s got the gun to his head and Boyd can’t call anymore because Robert’s other hand is slammed down on his adam’s apple and he’s choking and he’s going to--

“You’re not him,” Robert says, calm as you please. “There’s no one else here, son. You’re dead.”

There’s a click, loud at his ear. He’s squeezed the trigger, but no bang follows, no blood, no pain, no oblivion.

He opens his eyes and he’s staring at Raylan’s stunned expression. His hand is shaking and his eyes are on the gun in his hand. Boyd’s heart is pounding too fast in his chest and his breathing is ragged, painful and raw. Raylan looks into his eyes. He says, voice distant and shocked, “The safety was on.”

He drops the weapon on the bed and it lands inches from Boyd’s hand. Raylan’s own are still shaking, small tremors that carry up to his arms. He flexes his fingers, looking down at them as though he doesn’t recognize them. His eyes catch on the ring.

Boyd is shaking too. His heart beat won’t slow down. He never thought, never ever had any idea Robert could--

He gives a violent shudder and twists away from Raylan, bending over across the edge of the bed and clamping a hand over his mouth, fighting to keep his stomach in check.

Raylan is there in a moment, hands across his back, soothing, murmuring his name like they’re anything but as fucked as they are. Boyd shakes his head, makes himself pull away. He climbs from the bed and onto unsteady feet, unable to look at him, unable to let him see the echoes of his fear, the crushing disappointment of his first hope in so long a time.

Robert is lost. Raylan is here, but he took so long to come back, much too long. He doesn’t have the control he needs to keep the stubborn man contained. They can never risk another episode such as this, another disaster. Raylan would never be able to live with such a thing.

Boyd makes himself calm. He shudders out a breath until it’s even and smooth and only loud to his own ears. He shrugs off Raylan’s hands. He sets his jaw and walks to the door.

His steps are slow, deliberate, close to faltering, much too close.

“Boyd.” Raylan doesn’t sound like himself. His voice is shattered, tiny pieces across the floor.

Boyd turns back. 

He sees Raylan’s wide eyes, his parted mouth, his gaping, wounded confusion.

“What are you doing?” Raylan asks.

“I'll see you tomorrow, Raylan,” he says and slips out the door.

 

Raylan doesn’t understand.

He stares at the door long after Boyd closes it behind him, like it might tell him why the boy walked out. His hands itch to touch Boyd again. His, Raylan’s--not just Robert’s. He can tell the difference now. 

Raylan can’t bear to look at the gun, sitting quietly on the bed next to him, let alone touch it, or put it back in its holster.

He lays back down on the bed and closes his eyes. He searches for Robert, something he’s never tried to do before.

Robert, the old man, or so he'd thought of him until now, had always been elusive and certainly not anything Raylan would go looking for inside his mind. Memories would come to him sometimes, stronger than they had any right to be, always pushing at him, pulling his strings, until he’d learned to fight it. After that, the only thing he’d do when he felt the old man rise up in him was fight to push him back down.

But that still hadn’t stopped him from taking on the man’s habits, his unconscious gestures, his nature, Raylan supposes. He’s never been the kind of man who examines himself too carefully. Maybe that’s Robert’s fault, or maybe his own, or maybe their natures are just so similar because they really are the same. Raylan’s never allowed himself to think of it that way before. 

He used to think he became a Marshal just so people would stop looking at him funny, just so he could keep his hand at his hip, just because that always felt right. He never wondered why it was it felt that way. Now he knows exactly why and he finds he can’t hate it anymore. It’s a part of him and must have always been.

He thinks, if a man he didn’t recognize was insisting that he was the most important thing in Raylan’s life, he’d have a hard time not reaching for the gun too. 

He knows Robert Landry was a man out of another time, a man who lost his moral compass in an aborted fall from the gallows, a man who’s only second chance had been in the eyes, in the deeds, of the boy he’d always loved, the only thing he’d ever loved. 

He knows Robert Landry was the kind of man other men fear, the kind of man who made a room fall silent when he entered. He was a brutal man, an efficient one. He spent five years learning to be patient, quiet, to see in the dark, rustling the cattle with Johnny from Texas to Nebraska. He spent ten after the gallows holding a gun steady on women and children, on old men and jabbering cowards, and taking their money with a grim smile and a tip of his black hat.

He’d killed men in the desert. He’d left their bones to rot in the sun. He’d never liked Jerome. He’d wished for the prairie, for the stars that he and Johnny would count together, numbering the years of happiness set out before them. They had each other and then, they’d known they’d never need anything else.

But Johnny had run, then come back only to hear of Robert’s death, a sham on account of a faulty rope and a mayor too eager to look good. It was lucky Robert got out. 

It was anything but lucky that Johnny ended up running to the only goddamn town in the whole West where they would pin a deputy’s star on a cattle rustler with nothing but the clothes on his back and a sea of grief behind his eyes. It was anything but lucky that Robert found him there, eyes fixed on him from across the saloon like he was staring down a ghost.

It was anything but lucky that Garrity, from the copper mine, wanted to dig out their cave, the place they carved for themselves, that they could only escape to once in a blue moon and only for a night, only with dread for the morning, with heavy sighs and words of love buried deep in silence. He heard later Johnny got everyone convinced it was Indians, Apache or some such, camping out for whatever heathen practice the idiots at the town thought they might engage in in a cave the size of a jail on the side of that red mountain. They blew the face off that mountain three weeks later.

And it was anything but lucky that the goddamn town caught fire and--

Something forces Raylan’s eyes open. He blinks to clear the dizziness that seems to have just set the room spinning and realizes it’s morning, or daylight at least. Had he passed the night in Robert’s memories? He still had trouble thinking of them as his own. His head still felt like it was being split open and he didn’t understand that either. If they’re the same, if he knows that now, shouldn’t this have stopped?

Raylan rolls over to presses his forehead to the mattress, fighting the desire to curl up and shudder through the pain until sleep and the past can find him again. He searches for Robert and can’t find him, can only feel the echo of his hurt and confusion, his need for Johnny, his fear that his boy is lost again and that they’ll never--

Raylan’s phone is ringing.

He makes himself crawl to the nightstand, to pick up the phone he’d set there, next to the holster, next to his sidearm. He answers as clear as he can, “Givens.”

“Your friend Boyd Crowder left a message on my phone last night, Raylan,” Art’s voice comes through too loud over the line.

Raylan should say immediately that they aren’t friends, but he can’t bring himself to do it. His thoughts stall on Boyd on just what the hell he thinks he’s doing. “Yeah?” he asks, mystified. “What did he say?”

“He said that he wanted to make sure I knew he,” Art pauses, quoting the exact words, changing his tone and his accent just a bit, “‘didn’t see no room for you in Kentucky.’ And that he was sure you hadn’t told me he gave you twenty-four hours to get out of the state.”

“Shit,” Raylan breathes before he can think better of it.

“You didn’t think this was somethin’ I might want to know, Raylan?” 

Raylan shakes his head, everything seems to be spinning out. How could Boyd have said that? Why did he need to make sure Art knew? It was--

“Raylan?”

“Yeah,” Raylan says. “No, I mean, I didn’t tell you ‘cause I didn’t--I didn’t think he was serious.”

“Because you’re friends.” Art’s tone is deadpan, but there’s a sincere question there and a dubious certainty, a shallowly buried disappointment.

“No,” Raylan makes himself say. “He sounded serious. It wasn’t no joke, but I...I thought I could handle it.” His head is pounding again. He can’t feel Robert’s presence, but he feels his pain, it’s all over his body, this creeping, ever-present terror that everything is already ruined, that Johnny’s lost to him. 

“Raylan, are you all right?”

Raylan hears himself make some kind of noise, like a wounded animal. He can’t keep it down and it comes out strangled and pathetic. 

“You aren’t any better? You seen a doctor?”

Raylan makes himself stand up and look into a mirror. He looks pale and drawn. He hasn't eaten, his eyes are dark. He looks like something is tearing him up from the inside. He knows no doctor can help him and he knows he can’t see Art, not like this. Any reasonable person would take one look at him and drive him to the emergency room.

He puts all the strength, all the bravado he can into his voice and he makes himself smile as he says, “Oh, I’m fine, Art. Sorry about that, I dropped the phone. Listen, you’re right. Boyd is a buddy of mine, I should have told you before. He ain’t serious about the twenty-four hours. He don’t have any idea about how serious we take that shit. I’m gonna go down to Harlan and talk to him--”

“Raylan, he said you shouldn’t come alone.”

“He’s just bein’ an asshole. You think he’s gonna shoot me? You know where I’ll be. I’ll call it in if I need back up--which I won’t. He’s got his panties all bunched up about something from years ago, but it ain’t nothing to worry about. I’m gonna talk to him--”

“Raylan, did you forget about that boy on Tate’s Creek Bridge? The church. This ain’t just some old friend, Boyd Crowder is dangerous. You shouldn’t even be on this case anymore you got this kind of history.”

“We don’t have the ID for the church, you said so yourself. We’re not going to get him on it and he knows it. I end up dead, there won’t be anything stopping you from putting him away and he knows that too. I’m going, Art. I’ll call you later.”

Raylan hangs up the phone before he has to argue any more. 

He lets out a breath, rubs his palms across his face, his tired eyes. He doesn’t understand why his head is still pounding. He needs to get his mind right. He needs to be in control. 

“Fuck you, Robert,” he says to the air and picks up his weapon. He’s got to get to Harlan.

 

It takes him nearly half again the time it usually does to get down there. He has to stop a lot, for water, coffee, whatever he thinks might help him focus. He’s pushing too hard by the end. He feels wrung out and strung up tight and he knows he needs to rest. Robert’s grief is loud in his ears and pressing hard on his eyes. He can’t look for Boyd, not like this, so he drives to Ava’s.

He has to lean most of his weight onto her doorframe when he rings the bell and she answers the door with a smile before she sees the look on his face. “Jesus, Raylan, what’s the matter?”

He says something he can’t remember later about needing a bed and twenty-four hours. He can see she doesn’t understand, maybe because he’s mumbling, or maybe because he can’t string a sentence together in that moment, but she brings him inside anyway and helps him up the stairs and into her guest room regardless.

He wakes, hours later, to the smell of fried chicken and the cracking, too loud, laughter of Boyd Crowder echoing up the stairs.

He feels better, calmer. He feels like he's got a grip.

Raylan walks down the stairs of Ava's house and into her dining room where Boyd is sitting, like it's his own home, his own seat, easy as you please, at the table.

The food is laid out like a family-style dinner. He remembers Ava saying she was going to make him chicken, her muttered worries that he must not have eaten for days he looked so bad.

Raylan stands in the doorway. "What are you doing here, Boyd?" he asks.

Boyd smiles at him, too hard. There's something desperate in his eyes, but he looks relaxed, at complete ease to anyone else, besides Raylan, besides Robert. "I thought we'd have a family dinner together," Boyd says, still smiling.

"This ain't your home or your family," Raylan tells him, wishing to hell Ava wasn't in the room. "I was gonna come find you."

Boyd tilts his head and motions to her standing close behind Raylan. "Aw, but Ava's gone and set this all out for us, Raylan. We can't let it go to waste. Eat with me. Come on now." He waves them to the table. There is a gun sitting next to his right hand.

"What are you _doing_?" Raylan asks again as he sits.

"Well, I'm about to enjoy the hell out of this meal, son," he answers lightly and begins to dig in.  
Raylan looks down at his plate, realizing all in a rush that he is actually starving, but wanting nothing at all to do with the food set in front of him. He thinks he's going to be sick. He wants to know what Boyd is thinking. There's something terribly wrong happening here.

Robert's fear is compounding a growing sense of dread inside Raylan, it's all mixing together, roiling in his empty stomach. He stares at Boyd. He doesn't lift his fork.

Boyd blinks at him, frowns now, and says with real concern, "Raylan, you look like you’re going to keel over. Eat something, goddammit."

Raylan turns to Ava and smiles weakly. "Honey, I'm real thirsty. You think you can go get Boyd an' me a couple glasses of water?" He turns back to Boyd. "That okay, Mr. Hostage Situation?"  
Boyd scowls at him. He grinds out a, "Fine," and Ava scrambles back from the table and out of the room.

"You look like shit," Boyd tells him, all that concern crashing down across his brows, rising up in the dark recesses of his eyes. "I swear, Raylan. You're not doin' yourself any favors by--"

" _What. Are. You. Doing, Boyd?_ " Raylan growls at him, his hands bunching into fists in the fabric of the tablecloth.

Boyd smiles at him, sadly, resigned. There's too much love there now in his gaze. It's going to break Raylan in two and Robert can see Johnny now, and he thinks he's going to start sobbing. "Someone needs to get out, Raylan," Boyd says quietly. "I know that you can't. So, I will."

He's going to do something terrible. He's going to make Raylan put him away.

Raylan shakes his head. It won't happen. He won't let it. Can't. "You don't get to decide that, Boyd. Not without me. You don't get to do this, not while I'm sitting right here."

Boyd only shakes his head right back, slowly, sadly. There never was any convincing Johnny. Robert knows that.

Raylan wants to know what he's waiting for then.

Ava's taking forever with the drinks. Boyd is watching for her. Raylan closes his eyes in realization. He wants a witness. He's planned this. He knew the whole time.

He says, "You don't have to Boyd. I think we can work it out. I do. Please, baby," Raylan doesn't know where that endearment came from, but Boyd looks at him, startled, he smiles softly. "Please, don't--"

Boyd's eyes shift fast to the door. Ava's just come in and she's got Bowman's hunting rifle in her hands. 

_Oh God_ , Raylan thinks as Boyd raises his hands, not high enough. He grins, terrifying and manic, "Now, Ava," he says. "You only shoot people while they're eatin' supper." He wants her to think he thinks it's hilarious. Her eyes are wide and she tightens her fingers on the trigger. Raylan knows she thinks Boyd’s there to kill her, that he’ll kill Raylan and then her.

But she's not calm enough. She's going to miss. Boyd's face shows a flash of worry and everything in Raylan wants to scream at him not to as he reaches for the gun on the table, because Raylan’s sidearm is in his hand before he thinks about it and he pulls and the sound is deafening and Boyd is on the floor.

Raylan think perhaps the ground falls out from under his feet, spinning out into oblivion, but he can’t be sure, because he can’t see Boyd and that’s all that matters to him. There is a table in the way, and that’s not right, so he uses whatever strength he has left to push it to the side of the room. And there Boyd is, lying prone a red stain across his chest, spilling onto Ava’s wood floor.

Raylan can’t move. He feels as though he should go to him, but his limbs won’t cooperate. Everything is a haze, except the tunnel vision of Boyd on the floor, bleeding out his blood for him. Ava is there already, looking over her shoulder at the table at Raylan, like she thinks he’s lost his mind.

He might have. He feels disconnected, he feels adrift, unmoored. He feels Robert pick up the pieces.

Boyd makes a choking groaning sound and Raylan’s on his knees, his glock scraping across the floor, still tight in his hand. “Y-you did it,” it sounds like an accusation, like he can’t believe it. “You shot me.”

Raylan puts his head in his hands, fingers still curling around the grip of the glock. He closes his eyes, and the world in on fire. The town is on fire.

Robert's boys hadn't started it, but they'd been damn sure they were going to profit from it. They rode in, through the turmoil and the screams, into the bank, wooden and collapsing around them, and out again and that was where Johnny caught up with them, in the street outside an inferno.

There’d been words. They hadn’t seen each other in too long. The words were bitter, so were the feelings behind them, and no one else understood. One of the deputies, the young kid, trying to prove himself had aimed his weapon. Robert drew down and he missed. 

Johnny was gut shot, bleeding out in the ground, a hundred eyes on his killer, dark and accusing and Robert had stood, eyes wide, heart stopped, and he’d fired a second bullet, only the two, staring long at the death of his poor boy, into his own mouth. He’d set his teeth on the barrel, tasted the red-hot iron and he’d fired, never giving it a second thought. Johnny watched him do it, calling something beautiful and unintelligible, bleeding out his life into red dirt. 

He thought, at least he’d given Johnny the satisfaction of seeing his murderer put to justice. Johnny had talked so much about justice near the end.

And Robert had woke maybe moments, so many years, later inside the mind of a little Kentucky boy watching a western program on a black and white tv.

He uses Raylan’s hand--or Raylan lifts his hand, the rest of his body limp as a rag doll, kneeling under the weight of it all, staring at Boyd on the floor. He lifts the glock. This time the safety's not on.

No, no, he is anything but safe.

He closes his eyes. He opens his mouth.

He hears Boyd cry, broken and harsh, “Don’t you put that gun in your mouth, Raylan. You ain’t him. Don’t you fucking do it.”

Raylan blinks, frowns. That’s not right. “You said I was,” he murmurs, sounding lost even to his own ears. He is. They are. Nothing makes sense. Boyd is dead on the floor. Johnny is lost again.

“Not _only_.” Boyd croaks, not dead then, close to it. He should see. It’s fucking justified.

“ _Raylan_ ,” Ava cries. He’s forgotten she’s there.

Boyd’s voice again. Raylan--Robert’s closed his eyes to it. “Don’t you make me watch you again. Christ, boy. N-never had a nightmare,” he coughs and it’s wet, palpable, “didn’t end with a gun in your goddamn mouth.” His breath, his words are labored. “ _Don’t,_ ” he cries, “ _Raylan_.”

Ava is next to him now and not Boyd. He wants to tell her, go to him, help _him_. But there is a barrel between his lips and tears in his eyes. He shakes his head, Robert wants to squeeze the trigger. He knows, he _knows_ Johnny is dead. But Raylan can hear Boyd breathing, still, can hear his groans of pain.

Johnny said no, too, said don’t, but he was dead already, his insides falling out in the street. No one could put them back in.

“Raylan, honey,” Ava’s voice is high and fearful. “Please put down that gun.” She pauses and he does nothing. His eyes are on Johnny--on Boyd, who is breathing, who has crawled somehow across the floor, twisted himself around to look into his eyes. “You need t’ listen,” he says, words clipped and almost garbled from pain. “You never listen, darlin’.”

Raylan takes the gun from his mouth, but Ava’s sigh of relief becomes strangled as he lifts the barrel instead to his temple, finger still tight on the trigger. “Should I do it this way, then?” he grinds out. “Like he was gonna do you?” He blinks rapidly, he thinks of the times before. “You think--you think I haven’t thought of this before? You think just because I didn’t know, I never thought it was an option? I can’t tell you--Boyd, I--I put this gun to my head so many times, when--when he just wouldn’t shut up and I--”

He breaks off because he sees Boyd’s mouth moving, like he wants to speak and has nearly lost the power. “You said. Work it out,” he whispers.

Raylan shakes his head again, pressing the gun harder. “I can’t. I need you--Boyd, I won’t be all right if you ain’t here!”

Boyd blinks at him and he actually smiles, as though Raylan’s being some kind of moron. The humor seems to have put more breath in his lungs because he rasps, “Well, I won’ either, darlin’. You cud still do me th’ courtesy of waitin’ t’see if I die.”

Raylan stills. There had been no question before, those long years ago, and Robert was so near in his mind he’d forgotten. Boyd might not die. He shudders and gasps and he looks at Boyd watch him realize. “Y-you ain’t dead yet,” he whispers.

“No, Raylan,” he says and closes his eyes.

He lowers the gun.

Ava’s hands are on him, his shoulder, small and cool, and around his fingers on the glock, smooth and right, and she pulls it away from him and he lets it go, not because she’s taking it, but because Boyd wanted him to, because he still might live.

He blinks and he tells her, voice sounding strange, “Call 911. Right now.” She should have done it ages ago, hours it feels like.

He looks at Boyd, so close, but too far to bridge. He looks at his hands, sees blood on them, when he knows that they are clean. He falls to his hands then, palms open, down, and retches out the meager contents of his stomach onto Ava’s floor. His insides turns over and over and he shivers through his fear. 

He thinks of modern medicine, of the things that Robert’s never known, and he hopes.

“I’m sorry,” he says, unsure if Boyd can hear him. There is no response.

He pushes himself back against the wall, away, and stares across the room. Ava’s got the cordless phone. They’re telling her to do things, to save Boyd’s life. Raylan can’t move. There are tears on his cheeks, he thinks. She sits with Boyd, she looks at Raylan, and he knows that she sees them.

“Raylan, what happened here?” she asks him as they wait. He wonders where she put his gun and doesn’t answer.

He watches the paramedics come. Looks on, unmoving, as they roll Boyd out. Ava is standing now and she crosses her arms in front of her, like she’s cold. She looks down at him as though he’s making her that way. His gaze falls back to the red pool on the floor. His eyes unfocus, he thinks of all that red dirt, the dry dust, the thick sand in Jerome and how it lit up for that fire and then burned black.

“Raylan.”

He startles out of the desert, back into Ava’s house. There are hands at his shoulders and they’re larger than before. The voice is deep, concerned, Raylan thinks he might be sick again. “Art,” he says, still staring at the blood.

“Son, you gotta get up now,” Art tells him. “You gotta get up or they’re going to roll you out of here on a stretcher, all right? That’ll look really bad on the report, so...”

Raylan lets himself be pulled to his feet. He’s unsteady, but Art holds onto him and they make it to the Marshal’s car parked in front of Ava’s house. The ambulance is gone and suddenly Raylan feels an irrepressible need to be near Boyd. He has to, he can’t imagine why he thought he should stay away.

“Art,” he says, his voice still sounding strange, as though he’s been underwater. He grasps hard at Art’s shoulder, pulling tight on his shirt. “Art, you have to take me to the hospital.”

Art stops them in their tracks and Raylan tries to push forward, but art stops him, looking him up and down. “What’s wrong? Ava said you hadn’t been hurt, Raylan--”

Raylan shakes his head. “No, I have--I have to talk to Boyd.”

“Raylan,” he sighs, with more patience than usual, “I know it seems important. I know he’s your friend. But you just shot the man. For one, he’ll be in surgery. For another thing, it won’t look good on your report--hell, none of this will--but you can’t talk to him, son. You really can’t.” 

Raylan pulls away, roughly, almost stumbling. His fishes his keys out of his pocket. “Art, you don’t drive me, I’ll get there myself, I swear to Christ.”

“Raylan, I take you there, you’re talkin’ to a doctor before you talk to anyone. How are you even walking? You look terrible, son. Worse than yesterday. Do you have some kind of medical condition you haven’t told me about? This kind of shit is dangerous, Raylan. I need to know.”

Raylan starts to laugh. He makes it to the passenger side door of Art’s car and he needs Art’s help to get it open. He laughs as Art swears at him, demanding answers, getting nothing but increasingly desperate, breathless laughter. Art gives up for a while and Raylan finally calms himself, sprawling his exhausted body across more than half of the front seat, feeling the pull of sleep as they wind out of the holler and onto the state road towards the hospital. 

He starts awake more than once, images of fire and bullets and red blood on red dirt flashing before his eyes. Art tells him, as his eyes drift shut again, “It’s all right, Raylan. We’ll get you sorted out.”

They wake him at the hospital just long enough to stick him with a needle of something cool that quickly makes him warm and everything seem heavy. He looks up at Art’s worried face and smiles, even as he hears the doctor say words like, “Extreme stress,” and “shock,” and “exhaustion,” before he goes under again.

He thinks, that sounds about right.

 

They don’t release him from the hospital for thirty-six hours.

They tell him he’s exhausted, underfed, they note the bruises on his forearms--shaped like fingers dug in. They ask if he was in a physical altercation. They say he needs to rest. 

Art tells him he had to insist that he’d seen Raylan eat less than three days before. They said there was evidence Raylan’s body lacked nutrients for up to five. They say he must have gone without sleep for more than a day, which Raylan vehemently denies. He tells Art he went home when he was sent there, he went to bed.

He doesn’t mention Boyd.

He’s afraid to ask. He sleeps fitfully, dreams of Boyd dead on Ava’s floor, of blood splatter across blackened dirt. When he wakes, heart-racing, the nurses scold him, saying he needs to relax and he looks at them with fearful eyes and says he wishes he could. They ask him what’s wrong and he refuses to speak. They give him sleeping pills in a shot and he sleeps, dreamless, the rest of the night through.

They call a head-shrinker for him and he’s forced to talk about Boyd.

He has to stop himself from jumping out of the bed when the guy, a short-balding man with a jersey accent, says Boyd pulled through. He adds later, “Your shot was high in the chest,” and Raylan has to answer questions about whether or not he really wanted to kill Boyd.

He lies through his teeth and the man doesn’t call him out on it. At least out loud.

Art comes to talk to him again, a thick report in his hands.

“We’re going to need to put you on leave,” he says.

“No shit,” Raylan grumbles. No way he goes right back into the field. Even Art couldn’t turn a blind eye to the scene in Ava’ dining room, to his physical condition.

“We’re thinking of transferring you. Back down to Miami, maybe someplace else. Kentucky seems to not have agreed with you, son.”

Raylan closes his eyes, the irony blinding him. “Don’t,” he says quietly.

Art asks him to say it again.

He looks at the man, worried he’s showing his hand, terrified he’s not going to convince him. “Don’t transfer me,” he pleads.

Art nods, unsurprised. “I’m gonna need you to answer some questions for me then. Honestly, Raylan.”

Raylan looks away.

“I get to decide, from what you say, what goes in the report.” He sighs, rubbing his eyes. “I think that’s more than fair.”

Raylan just nods and Art takes a minute before he says, “You lied to me about your relationship with Crowder. You wanna come clean now?”

Raylan smirks. “No,” he answers and chances a look at Art, who’s not smiling.

“Raylan, what is your relationship with Boyd Crowder?”

“Complicated,” Raylan answers and makes sure to look Art in the eye when he does. Art opens his mouth, but Raylan shakes his head and speaks first, “Sorry, sorry,” he says. “It’s...hard to talk about.” Raylan lifts a hand, complete with IV attached to his arm, to rub the back of his head in discomfort. “Art, you ever meet someone you feel like you’ve known your whole life?”

“Sure,” Art answers. “If you’re tryin’ to get me to talk about my wife, you should know I’m not gonna get distracted with this.”

Raylan smiles weakly, but it fades fast. “Well, imagine feeling that way, double, about someone you really have known your whole life.”

Art frowns. “I’m not sure what you mean, son.”

Raylan shakes his head. He doesn’t know how to explain this without sounding crazy. “Boyd and I always knew each other. It’s a small town. Our daddies had business together. But we weren’t good friends, not really. I told you we worked together in the mine. When we did that, we got closer, like--like almost overnight. I dunno. It was...hard seeing him again. When I talked to you, I was hopin’ it wouldn’t be like that.”

“Wishful thinking?”

“Maybe.” Raylan shrugs. 

“How close were you?”

Raylan closes his eyes. “Closer than I wanted to be.”

“And just what does that mean?” It sounds as though Art’s about to lose his patience.

Raylan doesn’t want to admit they had a physical relationship, though he knows that’s what Art is asking, what he feels he needs to know. Raylan’s never thought of it that way, not until now, because it was always Robert who was with Boyd. Now that he feels like they’re the same, after denying it for so long, he doesn’t know what to think.

“I never thought I was...that way. But, you get down to it--and I know you want me to, Art--I was with him. When we were younger and... I saw him last night.” Art makes a frustrated noise and Raylan draws a hand across his eyes. “Nothing--nevermind, you don’t want to know the details.”

“I really don’t,” Art says gruffly. “But this has to do with the case. If this was in any way,” he pauses, looking at Raylan with this sad, almost desperate hope that what he’s asking isn’t true, “some kind of lover’s quarrel, some kind of retrib--”

“It wasn’t.” Raylan looks at him, hard, sincere as possible. “Ava had the rifle. He reached for the gun, Art, and I didn’t think--I just pulled.”

“That’s your job, son.”

“I know it,” he replies. He realizes he’s breathing hard now and Art is looking at him like he’s about to burst into tears.

“Raylan, you have to stay away from him.” Art’s face looks as though this is the last thing in the world he’d ever have to impress upon him. Raylan feels sort of bad for the man, somewhere in the back of his mind.

Raylan smiles and huffs something not far from a laugh, tired and sad, completely resigned. “Art, I can’t do that. I...I really really can’t.”

Art sits back at that. His hands tighten around the file in his lap. “You’re off this case. Don’t come back to work for a month. And you better hope your boy is as smart as he seems, you better get him to cut quite a bit of his shit out, and you better never talk to me about him, or any of this again. None of it will go in the file and you better, and I mean this, Raylan, you better pray I have no reason, _ever_ to regret this decision.”

Raylan raises his chin and meets Art’s eyes. “Thank you,” he says quietly.

“This never happened, so you got nothin’ to thank me for, you goddamn idiot.”

He pats Raylan’s shoulder as he stands and leaves the room.

 

They release Raylan two hours later and he spends another twenty minutes at least trying to get information out of the nurses as to the current location of Boyd Crowder.

Finally one of them, a youngish bottle blonde in scrubs decorated with cartoon kittens, takes pity on him, sliding a piece of paper across the desk on which is written a room number and _you look like you’re going to fall over :(_.

Raylan looks at the number, then back up to the nurse, and she sort of huffs, rolling her eyes, then gives him some directions. He gets there eventually, only to find Boyd asleep in his hospital bed, white bandage stark against his skin, large and looming on his chest.

He stands just inside the door for far too long, unable to take a step, until he forces himself to cross the room or collapse and end up right back where he started. 

There’s a chair pulled near the bed already, so Raylan slumps into it, staring blankly at Boyd’s drawn, sleeping face. He, frustratingly hesitantly, takes Boyd’s hand, lacing his fingers through like he had the night Boyd watched over him at Helen’s. He squeezes their hands together gently and searches Boyd’s face for a reaction. 

It’s not like he wants to wake him. He just wants him to be awake. 

Frustrated and missing him and unable to deal with any of it, he lets out a sigh and presses his face to their intertwined hands. He closes his eyes and doesn’t mean to fall asleep.

He wakes to Boyd’s open palm on his head, his fingers combing softly through his hair, IV and heart monitor brushing hard, cold plastic alongside soft, welcome skin. Raylan lifts his head to see Boyd smiling down at him, like nothing was ever wrong between them, or around them, or about them, like everything is and was always goddamn perfect.

Raylan presses his face back down onto the thin hospital mattress. He fists his hands into Boyd’s blanket. “I’m sorry,” he says too quietly. He knows Boyd will hear him anyway, knows he will understand he means for _everything_.

“I heard you before, darlin’,” Boyd says, his voice weak. “Didn’t have the words to say, there ain’t no debt, no due, no guilt or blame between us. Never was--or never should have been.” Raylan looks up and Boyd is still smiling. “You just never listen.”

Raylan’s about to apologize again, but Boyd gives him a look, harder in the eyes, but still mirthful and Raylan shuts his mouth.

“I scared you bad, didn’t I?” Boyd asks.

Raylan just nods.

“Well, you scared me. Let’s try not to do that anymore, okay?”

Raylan nods again, then adds, “Art wanted me to stay away from you.”

Boyd frowns. “Yeah?”

“I told him I couldn’t. I don’t want to, Boyd.”

Boyd’s hand falls from the crown of his head, to cup his cheek. “I never wanted to either, darlin’,” he says.

Raylan’s heart is beating quick, up in his throat, and he tries to smile, because he really is happy, but it seems too important to force such an inadequate expression. He raises his hand to cover Boyd’s. “But you would have. For me.”

Boyd shakes his head. “I would have done anything for you, Raylan. You ain’t figured that out yet?”

Raylan makes a face, turns his head to kiss Boyd’s open palm. “I’m not too quick on the uptake, I guess,” he says and Boyd laughs.

“You never were.” 

Raylan marvels that he no longer thinks it’s strange they’re talking about two lifetimes. It seems right now, after everything, more true than anything ever was, or will be.

Robert is quiet in his mind and he can get at the memories without causing a stir, he can be near Boyd without feeling him take over. He can see Johnny in Boyd’s eyes and he can reach back into the past and put a century of feeling behind the simple words, “I love you.”


End file.
